Licence Registers
Every casino here displays a licence. The three authorities behind almost all of them differ enormously in what that licence is worth, and none of them says so. This is what we found by checking.
| Authority | Is there a register? | Can a player verify a licence? | What we measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anjouan | Yes, a downloadable file | In principle. In practice the verification links we tested returned 404 | 1,493 licences captured; 294 expired and still listed as valid (19.7%) |
| Curaçao | No browsable list, despite a page headed "Online Gaming License Register" | Only one at a time, by following the seal on the operator's own site | 15 certificates read from the regulator; 9 licences covering those 15 brands, one company running five |
| Costa Rica | No register, because there is no licence | No. There is nothing to check against | 84 brands name it; 0 publish a licence number, because no numbering system exists |
Measured from our own catalogue on 2026-08-21.
Who licenses this market
Almost the entire offshore market runs on three names, and the shape of it is not what an operator's footer suggests.
| Authority | Brands in our catalogue | What that licence gets a player |
|---|---|---|
| Anjouan | 3,490 | A register you can search, and an expiry date it does not enforce |
| Curaçao | 480 | A certificate, if the operator publishes its seal |
| Costa Rica | 83 | Nothing. There is no gambling licence to hold |
| No licence declared at all | 357 | Nothing, and they do not claim otherwise |
Counted from our catalogue on 2026-08-21. A brand naming two authorities is counted under each.
The renewal wave nobody mentions
A licence is a subscription, and this market's subscriptions come due in clusters. Of the live brands whose licence carries a date:
- 516 expire during 2026.
- 679 expire during 2027.
- 216 already expired and are still listed as valid.
Renewal is not automatic and not guaranteed. A casino whose licence lapses does not usually announce it, so the date is worth knowing before you leave a balance with them. Every brand page here prints its own.
What that means before you deposit
A licence is only worth the enforcement behind it. None of these three carries the supervision a major regulator applies, so no complaint route reaches them from outside. They are not equivalent to each other either. One publishes a register and lets a fifth of it go stale, one keeps its records but hands them out one certificate at a time, and one is not a gambling regulator at all.
The pages behind these numbers
- Anjouan. The full register: 1,493 licences, of which 294 are past their expiry date and still listed as valid.
- Licences that have already expired. The casinos still trading on them, named, with the date each one ran out.
- Curaçao licences: 46 verified at the regulator. We followed 46 Curaçao casinos' own licence seals through to the regulator's certificate and recorded what it says. 12 licences cover more than one brand.
- Costa Rica: there is no licence to check. 83 casinos in our catalogue name Costa Rica as their regulator. Costa Rica does not license gambling, and 1 of those 83 publish a licence number.